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Editorial: Farmworkers deserve overtime after 8 hours

Ventura
Published 1:53 p.m. PT Aug. 30, 2016

United Farm Workers, CAUSE, Ventura County farmworkers and community members march down Cooper Road in Oxnard in April. The demonstrators were marching in support of a state bill to extend overtime pay to farmworkers.(Photo: Star file photo)

California is once again set to lead the nation in how it treats farmworkers.

Passage this week of the farmworker overtime bill by the state Legislature proved to be one of the more contentious issues of the current legislative session. When it cleared the Assembly by a 44-32 vote Monday, it moved on to the desk of Gov. Jerry Brown, who is expected to sign it into law.

Among Ventura County lawmakers, Sens. Fran Pavley, D-Agoura Hills, and Hannah-Beth Jackson, D-Santa Barbara, voted for the bill earlier in the Senate. Assemblyman Das Williams, D-Carpinteria, supported it in Monday's vote, and Assemblyman Scott Wilk, R-Santa Clarita, opposed it. Assemblywoman Jacqui Irwin, D-Thousand Oaks, abstained. We hope that she will explain her decision not to vote on this bill that is so critical to Ventura County.

The arguments were strong from a farm industry seeking to maintain an 80-year-old exemption from labor laws that created the eight-hour work day for American workers. They were persuasive enough to hold up the legislation among business-leaning Democrats in the Assembly until a late, all-out blitz by unions and farmworker supporters turned the tide this week.

The legislation requires that farmworkers be paid overtime if they work more than eight hours in a single day.

Currently, the law requires overtime to be paid if they work more than 10 hours in a single day. They also receive overtime on the seventh consecutive day of work and double-time pay after eight hours on that day.

Farmers locally and throughout California provided compelling arguments for maintaining a system that treated farmworkers differently than other kinds of laborers. At the heart of their argument was that they simply could not afford the additional pay. Farmers vowed to legislators that, if the law passed, they would simply not work their employees more than eight hours a day, to avoid the overtime pay, thus reducing income for those workers who receive a base hourly wage, and often a per-piece rate, for the additional two hours of work.

They pointed to an increasingly onerous level of regulation of agriculture that takes time and dilutes profits. They cited competition with foreign growers, who would undercut California farm prices if they were forced to raise them to pay for the overtime. They cited the historical exemptions the United States has granted farms when it comes to labor because of the seasonal nature of the work, and how it often must be performed in short, intense bursts when the ground or crops are ready.

Those are not unreasonable arguments. They make sense and show the pressure that continues to squeeze farmers.

But they did not convince Democratic legislators, and they do not convince us, to continue the antiquated system of treating farmworkers as a different class of worker in this state.

We welcome the passage of AB 1066, the overtime bill.

In the end, we believe it is time that as a state — and we hope eventually as a nation — we stop treating farmworkers as a different class of employee. Even with the remarkable new technology being used in agriculture today, we know it is the manual labor of farmworkers that is absolutely essential for the production of our food.

Many other industries could step forward and give detailed and extensive reasons why they, too, should be exempt from a type of labor law, whether it be overtime or the minimum wage or the length of the work week. But we have greatly minimized exceptions to our labor laws, instead favoring policies that treat all workers the same.

That's where we are headed in our treatment of farmworkers in this state. And that's where we should be headed.